American Fire: Love, Arson, and Life in a Vanishing Land

by Monica Hesse

But it also involved love. The kind of love that is vaguely crazy and then completely crazy and then collapses in on itself in a way that leaves the participants bewildered and telling very different stories about what actually happened. In this instance, the stories shared only one essential truth: When this string of fires began, the defendants were in love. By the time they finished, they weren’t.

Investigators had to find something they could sit on, in the middle of the wreckage, and take it all in. Sit on a bucket. Sit on a shovel. More times than he could count, Bailey liked to tell his students, he’d found himself sitting on a charred toilet seat in the middle of a demolished house, letting the fire talk to him:

The firefighters, who had now been called out nearly every night for a month straight, were exhausted. They were also beginning to wonder if they were dealing with some kind of fucking criminal mastermind.

“How would you like to help?” Bailey asked. “I want to put one of those cameras in your mailbox. But you can’t tell nobody, because we don’t know who the arsonist is.” “Oh, this is going to be cool—I’m CSI!” the resident agreed, promising secrecy and then promptly telling enough people that the story flew around the county: The police are putting surveillance equipment in your neighbor’s mailboxes.

Law enforcement had originally put forth a $5,000 reward for information leading to the arrests of the arsonist. They later quintupled it, to $25,000. On the shore, this was a huge amount of money—as Sheriff Godwin put it, “On the shore, I will tell on my mom for $5,000.”

While they were out patrolling, another fire was set and Neal’s cell phone rang: a tip from a concerned citizen. The fire that had been set that night, they were sure they knew who had set it. They told him who. “Are you sure?” Neal asked. The caller said they were sure. “Huh,” Neal said, “because he’s sitting right next to me.”

Charlie seemed a little fidgety when Neal and his patrol partner knocked on the door—at least Charlie himself remembered seeming a little fidgety—but then again, to other people he often seemed that way. After he’d kicked drugs he’d acquired a caffeine habit; those who would see him at the body shop remembered him leaving every hour, on the hour, to run to the gas station for twenty-four-ounce cups of coffee until he was bouncing off the wall like a cartoon chipmunk. “All that coffee is going to kill him,” his stepdad would remark, and Neal, who knew Charlie’s backstory, once replied, “Yeah. But it’s better than what he used to do.”

Local teachers and nursery owners and waitresses all heard the warnings on the radio to stay away because traffic was being diverted, and then they all got in their cars and drove precisely to the spot they had been instructed to avoid, just to see

They drove past it again and again, and Tonya kept asking why she didn’t see any flames yet. Eventually, Charlie couldn’t think of any other excuses. He had to tell her he’d lied. He hadn’t actually lit anything on fire. She didn’t seem mad, really. Just a little exasperated that she’d entrusted Charlie with a task he clearly wasn’t up to. “Never send a man to do a woman’s job,” he remembered her teasing, but almost in a friendly, flirtatious way. They went back, and they burned that house down, Charlie says, and then they burned sixty-six more after it.

Later, Bobby Bailey, the Fire Marshal’s Office instructor whose pride had been so wounded during the investigation that he left in the middle of it without even bothering to fully pack up his hotel room, would nurse his hurt by telling himself that they had been dealing with geniuses, in a way. “They were so freaking stupid about their fires,” he decided, “that they were smart.”

“The greatest arsonist in the history of all of Virginia—the one who kept us up night after night after night—and it was fucking Charlie Smith in a fucking gold minivan.”